Laws of UX (opens in new tab)

No, it's important that every single element vertically slide and fade in as I scroll the page.

How am I supposed to know this is "design".

The orthography principle.

Exactly.

It's unfortunate that accessibility is usually treated as an add-on in a lot of 'UX' project. Focus is heavily on visual design.

Accessibility needs to be considered from the start when designing new apps.

Making things accessible means making it easier for all users.

Which apps / sites have you stopped using because of poor UX choices.

And what are those things that made you stop using those sites?

One little thing I think makes a huge difference is just using the user agent a bit more.

You can write styles at only apply in high-contrast or reduced-motion mode.

Use relative text sizes so you the user agent can use a value for the root font size that isn’t 16px.

Use buttons for buttons, links for links, and <dialog> for dialogs etc.

I’ve thought about just making more web apps that have nearly no styling, maybe just some layout, but otherwise relying on the user agent styles. That’s a ton of user customizability for FREE! And honestly, it usually doesn’t look that bad.

When you build for the common denominator, people with brains often get left out.

Sites with surprise hjkl always make me smile

got a solid laugh. thank you

You used to be able to bring your own themes. Now if you're lucky, you might get dark mode, as a treat.

> hopefully with time we will get an Expert mode that allows customizable interfaces

I hope we won't. Why do you need this? What issue will you solve with it?

Interestingly, I do share this association, I have seen more people react this way, and I have seen more people consciously describe that association.

But I've never seen anybody having this as a first reaction to some software. It needs some time to kick in.

Bad UI is Bad UX

In some ways I prefer the older interfaces to more modern ones because, even though they were ugly, it was often more obvious what was clickable, what workflow was expected, and if you needed something it would probably be in the horrendous menu tree somewhere. Nowadays it's often impossible to determine what is clickable and what is not, but things look much prettier. I don't really need pretty, it's just a nice-to-have. Of course there are newer interfaces that are easy to understand and older interfaces that are borderline unusable. It's just been my experience that an older interface will be easier to use, though probably more annoying to go through. YMMV.

Humans are pattern-matching machines though. I think anyone, UX-designer or not, can notice annoyances that are clearly just not following the obvious pattern.

I know people that have quit jobs, because they were forced to use software that “I could never learn”. (Salesforce) It got in the way of them doing their job.

However, I’ve seen way more people tolerate an outdated or badly styled UI because “it just works for me, ok?”. No one is quitting a job because their CRM is aesthetically unpleasing.

One way to handle that is through multiple user modes. A simple case is how MS office shifted UI many times, but the keyboard shortcuts remained the same and accumulated to some extent. The key sequences are still there to navigate menus that disappeared before ribbons, or even before MS bought out the originating product. Key combos are a common thing experienced users learn almost unintentionally to speed up a workflow, but it doesn't harm the discoverability for new users or of new features.

It is akin to people adding weights to items to make them seem higher quality. Not in hiking gear certainly, but disassembly of held kitchen appliances or tools often turns up steel chunks used for that purpose.

Reminds me when i was a kid back in the DOS days and made my own GUI system in Turbo Pascal on a 386DX machine i had. It had its own GUI library and simple applications and i had made it look kinda like Windows 95 (because i only had Win3.1 and i wanted 95 - though my take was based on screenshots i saw in magazines so it wasn't very faithful, just what i imagined to be).

The problem was, it was too fast. The shell was up and running pretty much once i pressed the enter key after typing the command in DOS. Real Windows didn't do that, so mine felt bad and fake (to me).

So i added some code in initialization to create and delete 1000 random files with some random delays between them (to cause the HDD to make "doing stuff" noises and its LED light to blink) and show a progress bar for it. After that it felt properly professional :-D.

TurboTax also allegedly adds delays to increase the perception that the work the product does is very technical and difficult (which, of course, is not true).

It may be effective (although I'm skeptical), but is the sort of manipulative bullshit that sends me running. Sites and applications that do this are very shady sites and applications.

I think that's more of pseudo-science. I've never heard anybody express any distrust for a service just because it's fast.

Let's say you go to a store and ask if they have a certain product. The clerk says "Sure, here it is". Is that worse than saying "Hmmm, I have to check in the warehouse first"?

BS. Google have shown that any time loss in any stage of any payment process directly affect conversion rates.

Kelly Blue Book (kbb.com) pretends to take forever gathering the car price info so they can just run ads.

Strangely there's a "click here if fails to load in 10 seconds" link that lets you bypass it all immediately.

If I were you're user, I'd appreciate a setting to remove all such delays. That is, assuming I've little chance of convincing you to remove them permanently. (-:

Perceived loading time was a matter of debate during the NextJS vs RemixJS thing. RemixJS argued for fast loading time, while NextJS argued for perceived loading time.

Remix would show a white screen and two seconds later have everything ready. Next would show the header and a loader first then gradually over the course of 3-5 seconds have everything ready.

I see a lot of comments here about added animations because the request is too fast.

In this case I would guess the issue is not with speed but feedback. The user did something, nothing changed, so they thought it was broken.

Instead of the delay you could add a toast or some text with near the button indicating that the action actually happened.

Not necessarily. Something being too fast can be confusing. If you expect a process to take some time and it ends immediately, it can feel like it failed.

I remember the people from Blogger (google) talking about this problems. People were not very familiar with blog / website builders and users were confused when their blogs got created instantly, like "This is a big deal, me getting an entire website, what happened, what went wrong? It must have aborted the process…"

Depends on context. There's nothing wrong with slowing down to communicate discrete steps that may happen very quickly under the hood.

- Input was received - Input was processed/stored correctly - Outcome is X

Doing everything in real time can reduce confidence and understanding. If everything takes like 5ms it feels weird, sometimes feels even like nothing happened, so people might submit again or feel the need to call and check or whatever.

It's deceptive in the sense that you are waiting maybe 500ms instead of 5ms. But it can be better UX in terms of communicating what's actually going on and having people feel comfortable with their understanding.

On the other hand, artificially slowing down something like closing an advertising modal - antipattern for sure.

> quickest,

And this can be scientifically measured by mouse distance and clicks.

> most optimal workflow to accomplish a user's tasks

And this can be scientifically assessed by taking all use cases and refactoring over them.

List all the available goals at any given "location" in the program. List all the steps users take to get accomplish their goals. Consolidate and refactor, then optimize on the shortness, obviousness, and fault tolerance of every flow.

This is more fundamental to the user experience than colors or animations or the availability of any single feature.

> The perfect UI is the interface that has the quickest, most optimal workflow to accomplish a user's tasks

I disagree with this, actually. The perfect UI is one that the user doesn't have to consciously think about when using.

I disagree. That isn't even an interface. And this is the source of so much trouble. The "developer knows best" mindset. The developer will never know exactly when I want coffee, yet so many programs assume my coffee needs are just an algorithm that I secretly obey and just don't know it yet.

The best interface does nothing. It's idle and listens. Everything automatic must be fully transparent and be opt-in. Fully explained if not self-explanatory.

User instruction beats developer assumption every single time. If the user is "wrong" as arbitrarily defined by the developer, the least they can do is kindly instruct and point the user in the "right" direction, not assume, let alone assume they know better than the user about what they want.